Most poems about cities describe what the poet sees. "Symphony" does something stranger and more interesting: it asks what the city sounds like, and then refuses to let the poet's own voice get in the way. The opening line is a polite but firm command, "Sing me no song of Chicago", and the reason follows at once: "Chicago itself is a song." The city does not need a poet to celebrate it, because it is already performing, all day, without pause. The poem's central idea is that urban life, with all its machinery and commerce, forms a kind of music, though not a pretty one. The speaker calls it "noisy and tuneless," and yet the whole poem is built to make us hear it as a symphony anyway.
That tension between noise and music is what makes the poem work. Templeton borrows the vocabulary of an orchestra and assigns each part to something ordinary. The "pulsating wheels / Of trolleys and railroads and cars" supply the bass, the deep, steady foundation beneath everything else. The "chatter" drifting from theatres and bars strums the rhythm. Then comes the chorus, performed by "dictaphones," "cash registers ringing up fees," printing presses and typewriter keys. Notice who is playing: not artists or musicians but offices, machines and money. The poem quietly suggests that this is the real music of the modern city, the sound of work and trade.
The imagery is almost entirely auditory, and the word choices are precise about it. Verbs like "blurt," "strummed" and "floats" give each sound a distinct character: the dictaphones are clumsy and abrupt, the nightlife drifts, the street rhythm is plucked like strings. The phrase "rapid click-clack of the presses" does what it describes, its hard consonants clattering in the mouth. Even the borrowed musical term "staccato" is used for typewriter keys, which is exactly right, since each keystroke is a short, detached note. A modern reader may find these machines quaint, but that gives the poem an unintended charm: it preserves the sound of a particular kind of city, one of trolleys, dictaphones and typewriters.
Structurally, the poem is tidy and deliberate. It has four quatrains with a regular rhyme scheme running on alternating lines. "Song" rhymes with "long," "cars" with "bars," "fees" with "keys," "park" with "dark." The rhythm is bouncy and loosely anapestic, with lines that tumble forward in groups of unstressed and stressed syllables, much like a marching or rolling beat. The regularity is a clever irony: a poem about a "tuneless" song is itself quite tuneful. The form tames the noise, so that the reader experiences the city as organised rather than chaotic.
The poem also follows the arc of a day. The first three stanzas belong to daylight, with its traffic, offices and presses at full volume. Then the fourth stanza turns: "The song becomes softer at nightfall." The sound shrinks to "a soft murmer heard in the park" (the spelling is the poem's own), and the final image is of the "South Shore Electric" sounding its whistle "at dark." That last note is lovely in its smallness. After a poem of clatter and bustle, the symphony ends not with a crash but with a single distant whistle, the kind of sound that suggests travel, distance and closing time all at once.
What makes "Symphony" worth reading is its confidence in the everyday. It does not climb to grand statements about progress or decay; it simply listens. By insisting that a city's ordinary noises are a form of music, it invites us to hear our own surroundings differently. The next time a printer whirs or a train sounds in the evening, the poem leaves us wondering whether we, too, are living inside a song we have never thought to call one.